


thoughts on castles and building bodies out of clay

by prabbeli



Category: Original Work
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:41:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25416331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prabbeli/pseuds/prabbeli
Summary: a collection of poems
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Nebraska, or,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> animal death / death mention / injury

**_Nebraska, or,_**  
  
the state of Nebraska exists in  
few positives i can scrounge up.  
lots of sky. lots of corn.  
i’ll take the sweetcorn and leave the skies  
thank-you-very-much. happy hides well,  
unless you look hard, unless you look up,  
if you’re the sort to like skies. but  
Nebraska skies make me uneasy. they  
make me want to crawl on bruised  
knuckles and scraped knees towards the  
nearest tree and cling to it til the bark is  
scabs, lest it be the last tree, lest i be  
eaten by the grass. they make me want to  
pet the black of a fat cow dead alone in a  
field with no fences in sight. isn’t it odd?  
you could die and decay and your bones  
could bleach white in the sun and choke  
in the roots and no one would notice in all  
that grass, not even the cottonwood, miles  
outside the field and almost bone-dry  
itself, save for a stubborn wax leaf. save  
for a couple stubborn wax leaves. this cow,  
she is closer to twin billboards than she is  
to a tree, one advertising a long-gone  
go-kart course, one so sun-bleached the  
only lingering pale word is JESUS, and  
maybe that’s enough anyways. the rest of  
the cattle are digging for water in the dust  
and not even the lone cloud in those miles  
of sky will nod to the bloated body of a  
nameless heifer, not even JESUS and his  
billboard. and in the moment where i pass  
her on an empty highway i wonder about  
pulling over and dragging her into the  
company of a cottonwood, barely alive  
itself, but alive still, and someone to cradle  
her ribs, and someone in death to find  
company. 


	2. Joan and her ilk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> injury / death mention

**_Joan and her ilk_**  
  
I wonder if a saint is born  
with magnolia soft skin  
or with bruised knuckles.  
lord knows my own skin  
rips like paper and bleeds  
in the same scarlet hue as  
Joan’s did. the ufizi statues  
do not flush, but renaissance  
dames do. a testament to  
blood. I do not think that  
earth in all her beauty ever  
intended for women to  
bleed. I say this—for all  
my love of drooping marble  
I will never long for gold  
veins. Medusa told me this  
first: that marble is carved  
from the glistening teeth of  
a pick. history is written  
by and for the viscera of  
a girl. and Joan when I  
see you I like to think you’d  
be proud of the gravel-  
clogged scrape on my knee,  
my whetstone fingers,  
the way I bear a frown like  
a lion shows his teeth.  
there is no formula to map  
the way my skin folds in  
on itself. but there is a girl,  
and do not doubt it, she  
is young, and her face is  
caked in dirt, and she’ll  
spit into the cedarwood  
that will bind her body  
to flame.


	3. Chincoteague

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> death mention / animal death mention / infant death mention

**_Chincoteague_ **

the house dates back to, what, 1909? hard to decipher, hard to prod at tacky wallpaper and ask for a family history. i know the morgue records go back til then. did mister vanderbilt rest his head in a hardwood casket? did he pale in our apartment? did you see him when you pricked your finger on the second floor loom? part of me wishes i could assign names to the bodies that washed up on the lawn in the wet season. part of me wishes i were nothing but meat.  
  
it’s a cliché that writes itself in scratches on the wall. that our basement came housed with the alligator skin, that the old fox sat watching atop the stairs. our ghastly tradition involved hiding the damn thing, that the next poor bastard to wander down the hallway would be greeted with a snarl. it was especially bad when the gossamer lace draped its own skin over the fox’s head—wherein the patterns would snag on the nail that, for whatever reason, was driven into the beast’s forehead.  
  
can i ask why the taxidermist’s funeral home on the corner of cathell street was sold? they put the highway over the bog and in came suburbia for spring break. on the tour my grandmother uncovered a body. i do not think much on the final definition of my flesh, but i do not envy the unnamed infant. i wish for my ash and bone to become more than a cardboard box in the garage of a beach vacation home. i wish for a name. i do not think this is too much to ask.  
  
stop, stop with the physicality, there should be nothing tangible of an old death home. save the reality for six a.m. donuts or the grotesque sundaes staining our maw sticky. there’s a place in the grooves of skin for sand, or for sweat, or for a shiver. the woman who holds her hand in the master bedroom is does not have a place. i ask for empathy, even for a lady in blue. she’ll hold you, and if the quiet of rotting scaffolding is not your own, she’s fine company.  
  
the kids have stomachaches from funnel cake. their freckles fester like bee larvae crawling from their comb. we can sleep, though. we can sleep. we can pray to the froth of water that no ponies will drown today. but when the atlantic coughs up another hurricane there’s little else to do but huddle on a stiff couch and eat peanut butter from the tub. i cling to minkpelt and i list names from the obituaries when they wash up and i swear to god i’ll burn this house to the fucking ground.


	4. Paleontology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> disease / injury

**_Paleontology_**  
  
Equal parts mercury home to thermometers and saline:  
Mercury warded off sepsis once. I scoff.  
In winter months my hands crack from vacuum suds.  
May I be an experiment in trepanning—  
May I be a hand sealed in cheap glass and mud two hundred years after it was shot  
(severed clean off at the elbow).  
In the time it takes for the sun to bleach a Virginia bone dry  
(which, bear in mind, the ulna radius carpals phalanges  
are two hundred years old, and the bones still stain coffee-sable),  
in the time it takes for it to fossilize,  
for it to build a tomb of siltstone  
(a favorite sediment for painting on our naked arms in streambeds),  
for Appalachia to become a seabed or a desert or a glacier  
(did you know Shenandoah once scraped the belly of Venus?)—  
In that time—what do you think?  
There’ll be none left of any of us  
save for some former-bones that once cradled you to my marrow,  
sick with honey and lead.


	5. Inertia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> animal death mention

**_Inertia_ **  


The July routine begins as corn. See also: callouses. The stalks  
are not baroque—try, instead, a hydrangea, the hyacinth, the whisper  
a lace curtain utters when it billows.  
A white little strawberry flower will ask, When did you learn what  
love defines? I will be sweet if you bite tender. I will be sweet only  
if you bite tender.  
No child asks to shuck corn. Not when there’s a hollow in the boxwoods  
where giggling promises lie next to holly berries. But the nature of  
children is: pricking fingers on barbed-wire husks. Poking the vulture-  
gutted carcass of a roadkill deer. Hiding under the covers to practice  
cursing.  
I sit in the mosquito haze of afternoon. I am on stone, or I am on a  
lawn chair, or I am without clothes and with claws. I am frothing  
at the mouth. 

Sweetcorn sleeps in a woven basket of thorn. I tear her from her  
cradle. 


End file.
